


Deep Cold Night

by Nadia_Hernandez



Category: Charmed (TV 2018)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Hallucinations, Lucid Dreaming, Marriage, Married Life, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-26
Updated: 2019-03-26
Packaged: 2019-12-18 03:55:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18241868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nadia_Hernandez/pseuds/Nadia_Hernandez
Summary: Strange dreams visit in the deep of night.





	Deep Cold Night

**Author's Note:**

> I love the new Charmed--and they keep getting better every week. This one's kinda old a little bit--we've been out of Tartarus for over a month now!--but a little mental/psychological torture and coping mechanisms to go along with it are always welcome.

Strange dreams visit to pay torment in the cold dark of the deep night. Queer fancies, likewise, arrive often enough beside them to provide comfort.

He relaxes on one end of the couch while she lounges at the other end, stocking feet and long legs draped across his lap. She looks up from the papers she is grading and scrunches her face. “Ugh. I cannot believe you talk slash begged me into teaching intro to biology. I’m a research scientist, damn it, the only thing I’m researching right now is how goofy can my students get before my brain actually, like, implodes.”

“You’re doing it because Dr. Wareham fell ill after the term had started and you’re a good person, my dear,” he says. “We’d have had to cancel the class otherwise and there are seniors that need it for graduation.”

“Is it possible that someone lacking the foresight to sign up for intro to biology before literally the semester they are supposed to graduate, knowing that it is a core requirement, should maybe… not graduate?”

“That’s not nice, dear,” he says. “I seem to remember telling me that you put off your health and wellness requirement until the last possible moment.”

“Yeah, but that was basically PE in college--which, I mean, how stupid is that? This is… look, Harry.” She waves a paper at him. It bleeds from almost every line. “Just look at this. ‘Mitosis at the end of my footsis.’ I’m gonna strangle this kid, I’m really gonna do it.”

“It’s not as bad as it could be.”

“And how, exactly, could it be worse?”

“Well, your sister had--in her introduction to women’s studies course--a young man who professed that he wished to study women at a rather more intimate distance than we might prefer.”

Macy winces. “Oh. Ouch.”

“He would have said the same had I not convinced Melanie that, and I quote, ‘drawing him alive and leaving him for the ravens’ was a poor choice.”

“But would it, really? Be a poor choice, I mean. He sounds like a grade A snotwaffle.”

“I didn’t object to her righteous anger,” he says, “nor did I disapprove of the rather furious poetry of her response. It’s just that my office is carpeted and a fraternity brother’s spilled bowels would have been difficult to clean. Mrs. McNutt from housekeeping would have never let me hear the end of it.”

Maggie bops into the room while they’re talking with Taissa bolted to her hip. The toddler’s chubby face is a reflection of her mother and aunts with tawny skin and dark, huge, serious eyes. Harry wonders, on occasion, how he had any part in creating a being so utterly perfect but remembers, then, that his partner in that creation is pretty nigh unto it herself.

“Hey guys,” Maggie says, “guess what we’ve been up to?”

“Mischief, I would assume,” Harry says.

“You know what they say about assuming.” Her voice is sing-song, trilling and oh so young.

“What is that?” Macy asks archly, an eye cocked on her little pitcher with big ears.

“Er,” Maggie struggles, “that it’s a bad thing that good people shouldn’t do?”

She shrugs. “That seems like a fair assessment of the situation. So… mischief it was, right?”

“Well, yeah. But you still shouldn’t assume. It’s not nice.”

“What have you been up to, then?”

“It was so totally cool,” she burbles. “Wasn’t it, Taissa? Tell your Mommy and Daddy what we’ve been doing.”

Taissa, grave as her Tia Maggie is bubbly, says in a sweet, small voice. “We helped her friend Lucy, with the pretty hair.”

Macy raises an eyebrow. “So you’re trying to turn my daughter into a mini-Kappa, Mags? Into a Kaplet?”

“No! Well, maybe, I guess. But it’s in a good cause.”

“What possible cause could be good enough?”

“Well, Lucy and I talked about it for a long time, and we decided that the ‘traditional’ sorority mold, well… it kinda sucked. The whole thing just reeks of privilege and WASP-y nast.” Maggie sets Taissa down and encourages her with a pat on the bottom to run to Harry. She does and crawls into his lap. “We decided to do some outreach to less approached young women because thought that the diversity would really strengthen our organization. And single mothers were our goal today.”

“And where, exactly, did Taissa fit in?”

“She was our bait baby,” Maggie says, and then winces. “Lucy’s words, not mine. Lucy is not, er… she’s not good with words.”

“She is a uniquely tactless young woman,” Harry says, absently toying with Taissa’s rich, glossy curls. “I am glad to see that you two have had such a positive effect on each other.”

“I know, right?”

“Honestly, Mags, it’s kinda amazing,” Macy says. “You’re doing such a good thing by reaching out to people that your sorority would have never even spoken to that I’m almost not grossed out by you referring to my child as your ‘bait baby.’”

The wince deepens. “I’m not gonna forget that one for a while, am I?”

“Not if I can help it.”

“Forgive me if I make you some arroz con dulce?”

“Mmm, I’ll think about it,” she says, but is laughing. All is well in their little world.

And remains so through supper, a dessert as delicious as Maggie promised and debate with Melanie over the merits of Judith Butler’s blurring of distinction between the biological and social as an outgrowth of Malraux’s will to feel proletarian. The night is finished by a round of slow, gentle lovemaking with his beautiful wife. She is soft and strong, gentle, dexterous and falls asleep with a long leg draped across him, softly snoring. A better life cannot be imagined. 

That is why the dreams are so pernicious, dreams where he is trapped in a prison with no escape while a chortling serpent coils outside the walls and makes up the alpha and omega of his reality. The nightmare seems so vivid that it is easy to forget which life is real and which an illusion. Perhaps he’ll know in the morning but now, in the deeps of sleep, he suffers that which he cannot understand.


End file.
